Last Saturday, 13,068 people took the written test to obtain the higher-level Catalan certificate (C2), the official accreditation that teachers, various grades of civil servants, and language professionals need to practice their work. The surprise, for some examinees, was that after taking a break they were able to review the first part of the exam, which assesses reading comprehension and written expression, accounts for 57% of the grade, and has been eliminatory for a few editions. Vilaweb has collected complaints from some users because they consider it an irregularity that lowers the exam's requirements and gives an advantage to the examinees.

"We must save the current situation of Catalan," says Núria Graner. She even changed her major and this year began studying philology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) after seeing the Tria Filologia campaign and realizing the state of Catalan in Barcelona: "They don't even understand you in Catalan, they look down on you if you speak it, and the Language Policy Law isn't being enforced." Beside her is Aniol Torreblanca, a fellow student at the UAB, who has chosen the same path: "I speak Catalan with everyone and correct them if they make a mistake, affectionately, because I believe we must take care of Catalan and spread it," he says, adding that his degree will give him the knowledge and authority to do so. Further afield, Arnau Trilla, who studies at the University of Lleida, says: "I was already interested in the humanities and the Catalan language, but given the decline in its use in urban areas, I wanted to help address this and promote Catalan among young people, who are losing it." These are three of the students who have received the first scholarship to study Catalan philology from the Generalitat (Catalan government), an initiative that aims to attract more students and graduates in Catalan.

In the last general policy debate in Parliament, President Salvador Illa said that the National Pact for Language is one of the most significant milestones his government has achieved. Illa did not say whether the creation of the Department of Language Policy is also a milestone; whether or not I consider it a milestone, it may be appropriate to attempt an assessment a year after the department's creation.

The lack of Catalan language and literature teachers and, in general, of graduates in Catalan philology has set off alarm bells in recent years, to the point that 40% of substitutions were not covered last year. The Department of Education and the Consortium for Linguistic Normalization not only foresee a growing need for specialists to teach the language to adults in reception and secondary school classrooms, but also a significant number of retirements in the next decade, even among language planning technicians in the administration.

Only a third of Catalans have Catalan as their habitual language. This is one of the new developments that emerge from the Survey of Language Uses of the Population (EULP) that the Government publishes every five years. If in 2018 36.1% of the population had Catalan as their habitual language, now it is 32.6%, four points lower and fourteen points lower than twenty years ago. The Spanish language also fell by two points (46.5%), but bilingualism grew (from 7.4% to 9.4%) and so did the use of other languages (from 3% to 5.6%). However, there are more Catalan speakers (117,000 more, who use it with other languages) and more people who know it (267,600 more). The explanation for the percentage drop is the high volume of migration, which dilutes the effect of those who join the language: the growth of speakers is lower than the population growth.

"The irreducible Gaul of Catalan no longer exists," says the Councillor for Catalan Language of Girona City Council, Núria Riquelme, referring to a city in which it seemed that Catalan was safe. "A Girona rai!", they told us. Faced with concern about the drift of the language throughout the country, and in view of the delay in the roadmap that should be the National Pact for Language, some Catalan municipalities have decided to deploy measures to reverse the decline of Catalan. The Minister for Language Policy, in fact, encouraged them to do so a few days ago in the First municipal meeting on language. He asked them for leadership to "relaunch the language policy at the local level" in the same way as the first democratic councils, which organised courses and events to promote Catalan. That was the embryo of the Consortium for Linguistic Normalisation, "the main architect of municipal language policy for many years", warned Francisco Xavier Vila. For the councillor, the problem is that municipal policy has been reduced for years to just these basic courses, perhaps "due to the speed of the changes that have occurred", he justified.

Almost a month and a half after the unitary agreement for the use of Catalan in schools in response to the High Court ruling that established 25% of classes had to be in Spanish, no progress has been made. The reform of the linguistic policy law agreed by ERC, the PSC, En Comú and also JxCat has been postponed indefinitely. JxCat left the pact hours after it was signed, after it came under fire from associations for the defence of Catalan. The vote has since been postponed three times in parliament, in order to seek a broader consensus before taking it to the vote. Most recently it happened today: after parties decided to give themselves a further fifteen days to negotiate, the board of spokespersons decided to pull the reform from next week's agenda. And this time, according to parliamentary sources, no new deadline for the vote has been set.

For some time now, different voices have been calling for a new National Pact for Language. The data show that we are facing a new linguistic emergency, especially in the classrooms, where Catalan is in danger of becoming a mere ornament. Today, Catalan Culture minister Natàlia Garriga Ibáñez and Secretary of Linguistic Policy Francesc Xavier Vila presented the bases of a pact that, according to the Catalan Culture Department, aims to reach a social and political consensus on Catalan and "reach a consensus on the policies necessary to ensure the present and future of the language, an instrument of social cohesion".